The snow muffled everything. Soft and powdery, it fell from the sky in a steady, slow rhythm, covering every sound as if the world had been wrapped in a thick blanket of silence. Arthur could hear his own breathing, shallow and slightly trembling, and the irregular beating of his heart that seemed to echo in the frozen air. The forest around him resembled an endless, lifeless maze. Massive tree trunks stood like silent sentinels, their twisted branches bending under the weight of fresh snow, and between them shifted black, elusive shadows.

He was alone. Alone with thoughts that for many days had led him into the dark corners of his mind. Dutch had lost his mind. Betrayal had settled in the camp like a sickness, and the brotherhood that had once bound them together had crumbled into dust. Arthur had left, abandoning behind him ash, blood, and a silence heavier than anything he carried in his saddlebags.

And then he saw you. You stood at the edge of the clearing so still that you seemed to have grown out of the mist itself. A white dress clung to your body, the thin fabric swaying gently in the cold wind. Snow rested on your shoulders, in your hair, and on your pale cheek, which in the faint light seemed almost translucent. Your eyes, large and the color of a forest deer, fixed on him without blinking, and their gaze pulled him deeper and deeper until he felt he could drown in it.

Arthur froze mid-step. He did not know if he was looking at a woman of flesh and blood or something entirely different. Something older than this forest, something that remembered more than he could ever comprehend. You were calm in a way that felt unnatural. You did not run even though in his hand the revolver was slowly lifting, the barrel pointing directly at your forehead.

Your bare feet pressed lightly into the fresh snow. Beneath the thin layer of white there were tracks, but they vanished after only a few steps as if they led nowhere. In your right hand you held something small, a tangled bundle of herbs, strangely dark, on which snowflakes settled but did not melt.

Arthur felt a familiar prickle at the back of his neck. He had heard of you in the stories told in hushed voices around the campfire. The witch. The woman of the forest who appears when a man is alone, in the moment when he least should trust his own eyes. Some said she guided souls to the other side. Others claimed she was only an apparition, the echo of someone’s long-lost love.

His finger twitched slightly on the trigger. He looked into your eyes and saw in them everything he feared most: images of the past, betrayal, the faces of those he had wronged, and the blood he could never wash from his hands.

The white fabric of your dress lifted gently with each gust of wind. In that unnatural silence there came a faint sound, something between a stifled laugh and a long drawn-out sigh. Perhaps it was the wind. Perhaps it was you.

Arthur did not know if you were alive or if you were a memory that had come for him. He did not know if pulling the trigger would free him from you or instead bind you to him forever.

The snow kept falling and his hand did not move. The air between you was heavy, swollen with something neither of you could name and in that silence, filled with all the things left unsaid. The invisible target on your face, the unspoken desire to escape and fear.